Vaniman did not go on his way at once, though, by his daily routine, he was headed toward his bit of recreation which cheered the end of his day of occupation. Every afternoon he dropped in at the office of Notary Amos Hexter—“Squire” Hexter, the folks of Egypt called him—and played euchre with the amiable old chap. After the euchre, the Squire and Frank trudged over to the Hexter home; the cashier boarded with the Squire and his wife, Xoa.
In his general uneasiness, in his hankering for any sort of information that would help his affairs, the young man was tempted to follow the provocative Elias and pin him down to something definite; the flashes of shrewd sanity in the fanatic's mouthings had encouraged Frank to believe that the Prophet was not quite as much of an ingenuous lunatic as his gab and garb suggested.
Right away, curiosity of another sort added its impulse.
Usial's windows were uncurtained, though the grime on them helped to conceal activities within by a sort of ground-glass effect. But Vaniman could see well enough to understand what was going on. Every once in a while a canvas flap came over in a half circle across Vaniman's line of vision through one of the windows. Then a hairy arm turned a crank briskly; a moment later the arm pulled at a horizontal bar with vigor.
It was plain that Usial Britt was printing.
Vaniman had seen the shoemaker's printing equipment in common with everybody else who dropped into the shop. There were a few cases of worn type; there was a venerable Washington hand press. Vaniman had even been down on his knees, by Usial's invitation, and had peered up at the under surface of the imposing stone.
When Tasper Britt wanted a burial lot in the Egypt cemetery of a size sufficient to set off his statue in good shape, he secured a hillock in which some of the patriarchs of the pioneers had been interred. There was no known descendants to say him nay. A fallen slate slab that had been long concealed in the tangled grass was tossed over the cemetery fence by the men who cleared up the hillock. Usial Britt considered the slab a legitimate find and with it replaced a marble imposing stone that had become gouged and cracked. Vaniman had found the inscription interesting when he knelt and peered up:
Here Lies the Body of THOSPIT WAGG,
In Politics a Whig.
By Occupation a Cooper in a Hoop-pole Town.
Now Food for Worms.
Here I Lie, Like an Old Rum Puncheon,
Marked, Numbered and Shooked,
To be Raised at Last and Finished by the Hand of My Maker.
As Egypt knew, Usial Britt did not print for profit. He accepted no pay of any sort for the product of his press. When the spirit moved, or he felt that the occasion demanded comment in print, he “stuck” the worn type, composing directly from the case without first putting his thoughts on paper, and printed and issued a sheet which he titled The Hornet. Sometimes The Hornet buzzed blandly—more often it stung savagely.
Vaniman obeyed his impulse; he went to the door and knocked. He had always found Usial Britt in a sociable mood.
“Who is it?” inquired the shoemaker.
“Vaniman of the bank.”
“Leave your job, whatever it is, on the threshold, sir.”
“I am not bringing you any work, Mr. Britt.”
“Then kindly pass on; I'm in executive session, sir.”
The grumble of the cogs and the squeak of the press went on.
So did Vaniman, after he had waited at the door for a few moments.
Squire Hexter had a corner of his table cleaned of paper litter, in readiness for the euchre game.
He was tilted back in his chair, smoking his blackened T. D. pipe, and a swinging boot was scraping to and fro along the spine of a fuzzy old dog whose head was meditatively lowered while he enjoyed the scratching. The Squire called the old dog “Eli”; that name gave Hexter a frequent opportunity to turn his little joke about having owned another dog that he called “Uli” and presented to a brother lawyer as an appropriate gift.
The Squire had little dabs of whiskers on his cheeks like fluffs of cotton batting, and his wide mouth linked those dabs when he smiled.
He came forward promptly in his chair, slapped his palm on the waiting pack of cards, and cut for the deal while Vaniman was throwing off his coat.
“Judging by signs, as I came past Britt's shop, The Hornet is getting ready to buzz again,” said the cashier.
“Aye! I reckoned as much. I have looked across there from time to time to-day and have seen customers knocking in vain on the door. It's your deal, boy!”
Vaniman shuffled obediently.
“And there was a run-in this morning between your boss and his brother,” observed the Squire, scratching a match. “And Eli, here, called my attention to the fact that two sun dogs, strangers to him, were chasing along with the sun all the forenoon. Signs of trouble, boy—sure signs!” He sorted his cards. It was more of the Squire's regular line of humor to ascribe to Eli various sorts of comment and counsel.
“How crazy do you think Prophet Elias is?” inquired the young man, avoiding further reference to his employer.
“After listening many times to the testimony of expert alienists in court trials I have come to the conclusion that all the folks in the world are crazy, son, or else nobody is ever crazy. I don't think I'll express any opinion on the Prophet. I might find myself qualifying as an alienist expert. I'd hate to!”
After that mild rebuff Vaniman gave all his mind to the game—for when the Squire played euchre he wanted to attend strictly to the business in hand. And in the span of time between dusk and supper the two were rarely interrupted.
But on this afternoon they were out of luck.
Men came tramping up the screaking outside stairs that conducted to the office; the Squire had a room over Ward's general store.
The men were led into the office by Isaac Jones—“Gid-dap Ike,” he was named—the driver of the mail stage between Egypt and the railroad at Levant.
For a moment Squire Hexter looked really alarmed. There were half a dozen men in the party and he was not accustomed to irruptions of numbers. Then his greeting smile linked his whisker tufts. Mr. Jones and his party pulled off their hats and by their demeanor of awkward dignity stood convicted as being members of a delegation formally presenting themselves.
“Hullo, boys! Have chairs. Excuse the momentary hesitation. I was afraid you had come after me with a soaped rope.”
“I reckon we won't set,” stated Mr. Jones. “And we'll be straight and to the point, seeing that a game is on. Squire Hexter, me and these gents represent the voters of Egypt. We ask you to accept the nomination to the legislature from this town for next session. So say I.”
“So say we all!” chorused the other men.
The Squire set the thumb and forefinger of each hand into a whisker fluff and twisted a couple of spills, squinting at them. “The compliment is esteemed, boys. But the previousness is perplexing. This is February, and the primaries are not till June.”
“Squire Hexter, it ain't too early to show a man in this town where he gets off. That man is Tasper Britt. He has had ten dollars' worth of telling to-day by 'Sniffer' Orne. But telling ain't showing. What do you say?”
The Squire gave Jones a whimsical wink and indicated the attentive Vaniman with a jab of the thumb. “S-s-sh! Look out, or the rate of interest will go up.”
Jones and his associates scowled at the cashier, and Vaniman understood with added bitterness the extent of his vicarious atonement as Britt's mouthpiece at the wicket of the bank.
“The interest-payers of this town have been well dreened. But the voters—the voters, understand, still have assets. The voters have got to the point where they ain't afraid of Tasper Britt. The cashier of his bank can so report to him, if the said cashier so chooses—and, as cashier, probably will.”
“The cashier will attend strictly and exclusively to his bank duties, and to nothing else,” declared Vaniman, with heat.
“Hope you're enjoying 'em, such as they are of late,” Jones retorted. “But once again, what say, Squire Hexter?”
“Boys, you'd better get somebody else to sandpaper Tasper Britt with. I'm not gritty enough.”
“I'll come across with our full idea, Squire. It ain't simply to sandpaper Britt with that we want you to go. But we need some kind of legislation to help this town out of the hole. We don't know where we are. We can't raise money to pay state taxes, and we ain't getting our school money from the state, nor any share of the roads appropriation, nor—”
“I know, Ike,” broke in the Squire, not requiring any legal posting from a layman. “But it's the lobbyist, instead of the legislator, who really counts at the state capital. I've been planning to do a little lobbying at the next session. I'll tell you now that I'll go, and, by hooking a clean collar around each ankle under my socks, I'll be prepared for a two weeks' stay. Send somebody else to work for the state and I'll go and work for Egypt.”
“The voters want you,” Jones insisted.
The Squire rapped his toe against the old dog at his feet. “What say, Eli?”
“Wuff!” the dog replied, emphatically.
“Can't go as a legislator, boys! Eli says 'No.'”
“This ain't no time for joking,” growled the spokesman.
“Certainly not!” The Squire snapped back his retort briskly. He was serious. “I agree with you that this poor old town needs help and a hearing. But when I go to the State House I propose to wear out shoe leather instead of pants cloth. If you must rasp Britt, go get a real file!”
“Who in the blazes can we get?” demanded Jones, helplessly.
The Squire laid down the hand of cards which he had just picked up, thus signaling the end of the interview, impatiently motioning to Vaniman to play; then the notary narrowed his eyes and pondered.
The silence was broken by more screaking of the outside stairs.
Prophet Elias stalked into the office. He carried limp, damp sheets across a forearm—papers that had been well wet down in order to take impressions from the Washington press. The men in the room waited for one of his sonorous promulgations of biblical truth. But he said no word, and his silence was more impressive because it was unwonted. He marched straight to the Squire and gave him one of the sheets. Then the Prophet turned and strode toward the door. Jones put out his hand, asking for one of the papers. Elias shook his head. “Yon scribe has a voice. Let him read aloud. I have but few papers—they must be spent thriftily.” He passed on and went out.
“One of the city newspapers ought to hire him for a newsboy,” remarked Mr. Jones, acridly. “He could scare up a big circulation.”
The only light in the dim room was afforded by the big lamp at the Squire's elbow. He spread the sheet on the table in the lamp's circle of radiance. “Boys, The Hornet is out and it looks as if it has a barb in its stinger,” he stated, and then paused while he fixed his spectacles upon his nose.
Vaniman, sitting close by, felt that a glance at a public sheet was not invading privacy.
A smutted heading in wood type was smeared across the top of the page. It counseled:
VOTE FOR BRITT. GIVE PHARAOH HIS KINGLY CROWN
There was a broad, blank space in one of the upper corners of the sheet. Under the space was this explanation:
Portrait of Tasper Britt, with his latest improvements. But, on second thought, out of regard for the feelings of our readers, we omit the portrait.
The Squire, getting control of emotions which the observing Jones and his associates noted with rising interest, demurely explained to them the layout of the page after he had carefully inspected the sheet.
Then Squire Hexter began to read aloud, in a tone whose twist of satire gave the text its full flavor:
“We hasten to proclaim in the land of Egypt that Pharaoh Britt has reached for the scepter, though he had not loosed his grip on the gouge. You will know him here and hereafter by his everlasting grip on the gouge. He will take that gouge to Tophet with him. Then it will be heated red-hot and he will prance around hell astraddle of it. But in the meantime he is hot after the honors of this world. Give him his crown, say we. He has prepared a nice, new hair mattress on his brow where the diadem will rest easy. Under his coat of arms—to wit, a yellow he-goat rampant in a field of purple thistles—let him write the word 'Victory.'”
The men in that room were Yankees, with a sense of humor as keen as a new bush scythe.
The Squire sat back and wiped his spectacles and beamed on their laughter. Then he read on down the column, through the biting satire to the bitter end, having an audience whose hilarity would have delighted a vaudeville performer's soul.
Therefore, it was with inspired unction that the reader delivered the “tag lines” of the screed.
“We confess that we have a selfish purpose in paying this affectionate, brotherly tribute to Pharaoh. When he has deigned to refer to us in the past he has called us 'Useless' Britt. Now, if this tribute has the effect that we devoutly hope for, Pharaoh may be of a mind to give us back our right name. We ask nothing else in the way of recompense.”
The Squire folded the paper carefully and put it away in his breast pocket with the manner of one caching a treasure. “Boys, what are you waiting for?” he inquired, with an affectation of surprise.
Their wide grins narrowed into the creases of wonderment of their own.
Hexter patted his breast where he had stowed away the paper. “Egypt has a literary light, a journalist who wields a pen of power, a shoemaker philosopher. And modest—not grasping! See how little he asks for himself. Why not give him a real present? Why not—”
Spokesman Jones perceived what the counsel was aiming at and ecstatically shouted, “Gid-dap!”
“Why not use real sandpaper?” urged the squire, with innocent mildness.
Jones whirled and drove his delegation ahead of him from the room, both hands upraised, fingers and thumbs snapping loud cracks as if he were urging his horses up Burkett Hill with snapping whip. The men went tramping down the outside stairs, bellowing the first honest-to-goodness laughter that Egypt had heard for many a day.
Squire Hexter leaped up and grabbed his hat and coat from their hooks. “Come on, boy! It looks as if there's going to be a nominating bee at The Hornet office—and we mustn't miss any of the buzzing.”
The two followed close on the heels of the noisy delegation.
Usial Britt opened his door and stood in the frame of light after Jones had halted his clamorous crowd. The amateur publicist rolled his inky hands in his apron and showed doubt that was growing into alarm.
“Hold your nippety pucket, Usial,” counseled Hexter, calling over the heads of the men. “The boys had me guessing, too, a few minutes ago. But this isn't a lynching bee.”
However, while the crowd laughed and others came hastening to the scene, and while Spokesman Jones was trying to make himself heard above the uproar, an element was added which seemed to discount the Squire's reassuring words.
Tasper Britt rushed out from Files's tavern and stood on the porch. He had one of the papers in his hand. He ripped the paper to tatters and strewed about him the bits and stamped on the litter. He shrieked profanity. Then he leaped off the porch.
In the tavern yard was “Gid-dap” Jones's stage pung. Britt yanked the big whip from its socket and bounced across the street, untangling the lash.
“No, you don't!” bellowed Jones, getting in the way and making grabs at the whip. “Not with my own private persuader! Get aholt of him, men! Down him. Don't let him whale the representative we're going to send from the town of Egypt!”
That declared hint of what was afoot put the last touch on Tasper Britt's fury. He fought savagely to force his way through the men.
The voice of Usial checked the melee. He shouted with a compelling quality in his tone. As the man on whom they proposed to bestow the town's highest honor, he had already acquired new authority. The men loosed Tasper Britt.
“This is between brothers,” said Usial. He had stepped from his doorway. He stood alone. “What outsider dares to interfere?”
Tasper Britt employed his freedom promptly and brutally; he leaped along the avenue the men left for him and began to lash Usial with the whip. The stolid townsfolk of Egypt stood in their tracks.
“That's the best way—let 'em fight it out,” counseled Spokesman Jones. “Tasp Britt will get his, and it'll be in the family!”
But Usial merely tossed his big apron over his head and crouched and took the lashing.
“Isn't somebody going to stop that?” Vaniman demanded.
Nobody moved. Egypt had its own ideas about interference in family matters, it seemed, and had been tartly reminded of those ideas by Usial Britt himself.
But Vaniman was an outlander. He saw his employer disgracing himself; he beheld an unresisting victim cruelly maltreated.
The young man jumped on Tasper Britt and tried to hold his arms. When Britt whirled and broke loose by the twist of his quick turn and struck the cashier with the whip, Vaniman wrested away the weapon, using all his vigorous strength, and threw it far. Then he seized the frothing assailant and forced him back toward the tavern. “Mr. Britt, remember what you are—the president of our bank—a prominent man—” Vaniman gasped, protesting. “When you're yourself you'll thank me!”
But there was no sign of gratitude in Britt's countenance just then. His crazed rage was shifted to this presumptuous person who had interfered and was manhandling him; at that moment the liveliest emotion in Britt was the mordant jealousy that he had been trying to stifle. It awoke and raged, finding real excuse for the venting of its rancor on the man who had made him jealous.
“You damnation spawn of a jailbird—”
The young man had a rancor of his own that he had been holding in leash ever since he had sent Vona to fight her own battle, with his kiss on her cheek. He broke off that vitriolic taunt by dealing Britt an open-handed slap across the mouth, a blow of such force that the man went reeling backward. And when Britt beheld Vaniman's face, as the young man came resolutely along, the magnate of Egypt kept going backward of his own accord, flapping hands of protest. “Vaniman, here and now I discharge you from the bank.”
“Mr. Britt, that's a matter for the vote of the directors—and I'll wait to hear from them.”
Vaniman whirled from Britt, for the impulse was in him to smash his doubled fist into that hateful visage; his palm still itched; the open-handed buffet had not satisfied the tingling nerves of that hand.
Usial Britt had not hurried about raising himself from his crouching position. He was standing with his apron over his head and faced the citizens. He was smiling—an irradiating, genial, triumphant sort of smile! One might readily have taken him for the victor in a contest!
Spokesman Jones gulped. “We came—we was intending—but this hoop-te-doo—”
Usial beamed blandly and helped out Mr. Jones's efforts to express his intentions. “Yes, Brother Jones, it was quite a shower while it lasted. What were you intending to do?”
“Ask you to take the nomination for the legislature.”
The crowd indorsed the request with viva-voce enthusiasm.
“I certainly will. I am pleased and proud,” declared Usial.
Through the circle of men came Prophet Elias, his robe trailing on his heels. He stood beside Usial and faced the bystanders. He proclaimed, “'Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors, through Him that loved us.'”
Somebody handed to Mr. Jones his whip and he inspected it carefully. “Of course, there's more than one way of fighting a man—and I have my own notions—but maybe I'm wrong.”
“Eli has observed many a dog-fight,” Squire Hexter remarked; “and, so far as he sees, the attacking dog doesn't get much out of the fracas except a ripped ear and a raw reputation in the neighborhood.” He marched to Vaniman, took that perturbed young man by the arm, and said that Xoa would be waiting supper.
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